With the chill wind of austerity blowing through the country, religion’s warm embrace looks more and more inviting. Peter Oborne welcomes the resurgence of a national pastime: churchgoing
Writing in The Telegraph, Oborne who is married to a C of E cleric states:
It’s Sunday morning on Upper Street in the heart of London’s secular, left-wing Islington. The shops and cafés are doing a lively business and the pubs have opened.
But outside the portico of a handsome Georgian church stands an anachronistic figure. His white surplice flapping in the wind, vicar Simon Harvey is intent on luring shoppers into his Sunday service.
He is surprisingly successful. With a smile and a welcoming word for everyone, by 11am Harvey has gathered more than 100 worshippers inside St Mary’s Upper Street.
It is a mixed congregation: a mixture of young and old, black and white, the respectable middle class and the very poor. City bankers mingle with asylum seekers.
There’s a choir in the church, and plenty of children, who are taken downstairs to their Sunday School classes shortly after the service begins. The hymns are rousing and cheerful. Many of the congregation even appear to believe in God, not something that can by any means always be taken for granted in the Church of England.
What’s more, slowly but surely, the St Mary’s congregation seems to be swelling. Over the last 12 months, attendance at the main Sunday service at the church (where my wife Martine is curate) has risen by nearly 20 per cent, from around 95 to 115. Though much of this is down to Harvey’s hard work and charisma, the growing popularity of St Mary’s is part of a much wider and very striking phenomenon.
Church attendances, in freefall for so long, have started to rise again, particularly in Britain’s capital city. Numbers on the electoral rolls are increasing by well over two per cent every year, while some churches have seen truly dramatic rises in numbers.
Change is afoot.
More at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8970031/The-return-to-religion.html